


the odds of surviving

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Alternate Universe - Final Fantasy XV Fusion, Astrals Bashing (Final Fantasy XV), BTS as Kingsglaive Members, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Final Fantasy XV Comrades, Gen, Inspired by Music, Kim Seokjin | Jin is a Good Hyung, Kim Seokjin | Jin-centric, Minor Noctis Lucis Caelum/Ignis Scientia, Noctis Lucis Caelum Lives, Team as Family, World of Ruin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26270587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Kim Seokjin receives orders from the remnants of the Glaives: his number's come up, and now he must lead his group to Angelgard, to face a reckoning.He never wanted to go there. He never wanted to know what went on there.But the people who are sending him there survived that forsaken place, somehow, and maybe they're expecting him to survive its trials, too.
Relationships: Jeon Jungkook & Jung Hoseok & Kim Namjoon & Kim Seokjin & Kim Taehyung & Min Yoongi & Park Jimin, Kim Seokjin | Jin & Everyone, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	the odds of surviving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [johanirae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/johanirae/gifts).



> Written as both a birthday gift for Johanirae, and as a small celebration / token of gratitude for what should be ten years of friendship, but feels like so much longer: hence the nature of the crossover! It was Johan who pulled me into Final Fantasy XV in the first place, so I guess it makes sense to finally write this (and the brief mention of ignoct) :)
> 
> Quick primer on the nature of the group that the boys are part of: the Kingsglaive are elite fighters who should be protecting the King of Lucis, from whom they draw their magical abilities. In the absence of that King, they're now humanity's last defenses against a ten-year-long night, and the daemons that come with that night. 
> 
> In this story, the rapline are primarily magic-users and the vocal line are primarily melee fighters. Six of them came from the same homeland, Galahd; Jungkook was born in enemy territory (Niflheim) and raised elsewhere.

[bts x ffxv](https://www.canva.com/design/DAEIUxsZyKI/jJtAc1As3Bla_L4x2L3Atg/view?utm_content=DAEIUxsZyKI&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=homepage_design_menu)

He -- doesn’t really know what to think for a very long moment, and his vision blurs, and he cannot even see the laden table before him, let alone the older officers standing wary and weary around him.

Crunching sounds, softer, growing more and more intense, and then Seokjin blinks, looks at his own bone-bleached knuckles, the fists trembling. Did he strike the table or not? But the models of pylons and the life-saving power-lines are still intact and still standing, fragile toothpicks and string or not.

At the very last minute he recalls himself, and he offers an abbreviated salute, and he can feel the squeak of his boots as he steps back from the table, executes a slow turn, and walks away.

He can’t look back.

He can’t think about this.

And in his mind the crags and the great yawning rock formations of [A](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy/images/1/16/Eye-for-Islands-FFXV.png)ngelgard: the way he’s never been able to look at the place straight on. The way he trembles on the shores of Galdin, whenever he’s been there.

He’s never been able to think about the place rationally.

And now he’s being sent there.

No one gets in his way as he all but runs back to their makeshift dorm -- no one for him to see, calling out to him or trying to catch his attention. The smells of food, the silent gloomy play of the few children still left alive, the haunted looks on the faces of the handful of people who’ve ventured out onto the echoing empty streets, the stairs that creak loudly under the weight of him, the weight of entire stars on his shoulders, that he can’t even throw off.

Here is a room full of battered bunks. Blankets held together by frayed stitching and the iron-smell of old canned coffee, the sweat and the salt of a cramped space. An apartment that had already been cramped, in his opinion, when only he and Yoongi had shared the space.

Seven beds still pushed together into a skewed row, filling the room end to end and just enough space around the margins for their footlockers, their tiny useless hoards of things. A pile of weaponry next to the door.

Seokjin snarls, recrosses the room, and his own spear is in his hands and he -- wants to scream, wants to fall to his knees, wants to run the entire length of the weapon through something or through _himself_ and --

“Breathe.”

“I can’t.” Clipped response to a clipped request.

The haze clears from his eyes long enough to register that -- they are all here with him.

Jungkook peering from over Jimin’s and Taehyung’s shoulders, the three of them crammed in at the door. How could they have fit in there together? Why does the sight of that boy with the -- dyed-black hair -- make him want to fly into another rage? Something different from what he’s been feeling. A rage that is just as useless, and just as consuming. Can being grateful be part of that kind of burning anger washing through him?

Here is all the time that they had all spent in trying to make the days less harsh on their youngest, all this time that Seokjin is about to tell them is about to go to waste.

Or -- does he have to say the words? Does he have to start talking? Can’t he just, oh, turn away and hide his face in Namjoon’s shoulder, and maybe trust him to translate these feelings into something that the others can more easily understand?

In the end, it’s the quiet cold question out of Jungkook himself, pragmatic, that pulls at him, like thorns winding around his throat: “Where do they want us to go?”

Seokjin sighs, and feels the unexpected heat of the tears that escape his eyes, that fall into darkening patches onto his threadbare trousers. “Angelgard. Apparently it’s our turn to -- have a discussion.”

The silence that follows the room is as profound as an ice-storm, the kind that only Yoongi can conjure, and sometimes out of nothing but a stagnant pond on a lonely, tooth-beaten road.

Groan that might have been his and might have been Namjoon’s, but all Seokjin knows is the pull of those ash-scarred hands on his arms, the distant scent of burned leaves on his skin. The sobs that sit in his chest, imprisoned and too heavy in every breath he tries to take.

“I can’t do this,” he says, after a long moment. “I can’t lead you there. I will not. I -- you should all run while you can. There are six of you and there’s not a hope in any hell that they’d be able to catch you all. I -- I will stay, I will go where they order me to go, but Angelgard is nothing I ever signed up for, and at least I can give you the choice, the choice that I don’t have -- ”

“Then we’ll make it easier on you.” Drawl, razor-rough around the edges. “We’ll do it.”

He growls, looks up, teeth bared -- into the equally furious face of Yoongi. “The fuck and shit you are.”

“Fuck you too. You just -- gave up your authority over us. I heard you. We heard you. Okay then.” He watches Yoongi glance over his shoulder -- he wonders what the look means, when it makes Taehyung blanch and then get moving, all but hurtling away and out of sight, as if caught in a warp-strike, and maybe not even one of his own making.

“We’re taking it on ourselves.” That’s Hoseok, and the bag in his hand droops, sags, as he fills it with smaller boxes. Seokjin can just about make out the labels in Jimin’s hurried handwriting: flasks, bullets, and every single one of the potions still strewn about, every single one that they still have in this room, this one single place of all of them huddling together and trying to turn away from the longest night they’ve ever known.

Seven years of this night.

Seven years of waiting for this call.

Seokjin cries himself out, and then -- he hauls himself to his feet.

He looks around the room.

While he was crying the three youngest had come back in, and they’re talking to each other now in the clearest corner the room has, the one place they’ve managed to stack the plates onto the table, the one place they can all actually cram together in the rare instants when the dark hours align and they’re all here, all together, between all of the things that they can do, that are needful to do, in an eternal night.

Fetching and guarding and repairing and hunting. Crafting, when Yoongi and Hoseok turn up unexpected stashes of leather and steel. The whine of sharpening stones against dozens of tempered blade-edges.

He blinks, in the here and now: there are six weapons on the table between Jungkook and Jimin and Taehyung, all of them identical except for the colors of the tassels threaded into the butt-ends.

Even the beads, dangling and shivering as each [k](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy/images/6/6c/Comrades-Loading-Screen-Nyx-Dagger-FFXV.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20170804140047)nife is picked up and inspected and honed back to true in turn, those are identical too.

Seven black beads painted in -- old forgotten lights. The scatter of blue and green and purple, the strange colors of the distant stars, heat and illumination traveling through space and time.

Stars are only a dream now, Seokjin thinks, and sometimes he even sleeps and can’t remember what it had been like to trace out star-shapes through the night, what it had been like to talk about constellations and asterisms and the meanings of their old family stories. They’d all had their own, even with the gaping holes in Jungkook’s memories, even with the words that now press Jimin’s lips into a disillusion-sharpened line.

But maybe he can think of those stars, and he -- pulls his own knife and its sheath from the straps crossing in the small of his back. Hands it over, carefully, to an equally grave-looking Taehyung.

“I thought you’d fight us all,” he hears Taehyung say, after a moment.

“What makes you think I still won’t,” Seokjin says.

*

He thinks that the only times he ever sees Namjoon go physically still, steady and unruffled and almost immovable, are when he’s at the helm of some kind of sea-vessel or another.

But this Namjoon also looks like storm-clouds on the move, even as he grips the sticks tightly.

Seokjin glances at the breakers, foam-rolled violent, and doesn’t even have to imagine the kinds of reefs and barriers placed around that cursed island that looms so large in his vision now, there’s no way he can miss it. Darkness or not. Streaking fanning rage of lightning overhead or not.

Behind him he can hear Jimin and Hoseok: and he can tell it’s them because they’re swearing, violent and blistering and all under their breath.

He kind of wishes he could remember some kind of old curse to add to the air, something he’d maybe heard from those distant seaside-run days, but -- it’s Yoongi who steps up to his side, like a solid wall, like one of the few people in this world that Seokjin could ever lean on.

“I want to -- lay waste to this place.”

Seokjin coughs out a sound that’s too high-pitched to be a laugh. “If we even survive to get there, I promise you, that’s exactly what we have to do. ”

“We were sent to this place. Stands to reason there’s a way to get here at all. And Namjoon has things well in hand. -- Tell me you disagree with me. I’ll stop bothering you if you really do.”

“I try not to think about this place,” he says, evenly, and maybe it’s this sea and maybe it’s that island and maybe it’s this stupid task he’s been sent on, this actual official wild chocobo chase, and he might have been fine with doing it if he had been sent out on his own.

He can barely keep it together, bearing the weight of all of them and their six presences around him, here. Clinging to him, following his lead.

“No one wants to think about the stories,” he hears Yoongi say.

“No one wants to be here. And yet they all went here,” Seokjin says, from around his gritted teeth. “They all came back from here. Every single person who sent us here. The ones whom I spoke with. I -- why us, and why now?”

“Time,” is the strange and simple answer that he hears, at first. “I don’t know how long the night is supposed to last. Ten years seems weird because it’s so specific. Is that really what the, they,” and this time he watches Yoongi point toward the lightning streaking to the east of the vessel. “The amount of time needed for the Chosen King to prepare himself for what he needs to do? Is that a long time? A short one?”

“Is it sufficient time,” Seokjin says. It isn’t quite a question, he knows, and then in the next breath he can feel the others listening to them.

The words have always been important, for all of them, for all of the different ways they had to learn to communicate with each other.

He can hear: the old quiet hitch in Namjoon’s breath. The steps that mean Jimin and Taehyung stepping towards each other, shoring each other up. The _oof_ out of Jungkook as he’s, presumably, hauled onto Hoseok’s back.

The quiet tap of Yoongi’s boot on the deck, which is one of the few calm sounds he’s ever been known to make.

As for Seokjin, he still only has his own hands to offer to all of this, and he weighs his thoughts in his palms. “I -- don’t know about the Chosen King. I’ve seen the boy. I don’t know what he has to make him be that person, that thing. That poor kid.”

“Not a kid any more, if it’s been seven years,” he hears Namjoon mutter.

The boat seems to -- drift, or is it that Angelgard itself is on the move? Is Angelgard coming for them, or is it drawing away to taunt them? Seokjin eyes the rock-teeth soaring into the sky. He can’t panic now.

“Seven years,” he says, like he’s swearing. “I have known all of you that long. We have been fighting the darkness for that long, and some of us even remember the time before. Remember fighting other things. Not daemons, just everything else.

“Did you want to turn back now?”

Slowly, the answers come.

There is really only one answer:

Six other registers of _No._

He hadn’t been expecting that. It’s almost enough to make him cry.

“I wouldn’t have judged any of you if you’d wanted to turn back,” he says.

“It was too late the moment you said we had to go,” is Yoongi’s response, and the words might be stone-cold, stone-simple.

They’re still the kinds of words Seokjin might tuck into his pockets for safekeeping, or maybe he can pick out seven of those words, of those stones, so that he has one and the others have one each to carry around for safekeeping, too.

Angelgard’s rocks might dash those stones -- those words -- their lives -- to pieces, but at least, he thinks, at least they can try to stay together somehow, they can all try to weather this somehow -- the waves begin to lap over the gunwales and Namjoon hisses out his own long curse, as hard and relentless as the lightning that begins to fork brighter and larger across the shattering sky --

[*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VraKwzlFY7s)

He looks up until the bones in his neck and shoulders creak in protest, and he still doesn’t know if the expression on that massive face of soil and stone and mineral-veins has shifted or not, and -- really, what else can he do at this point but --

Hands grabbing at his and the storm-spark feeling weighing heavily on his tongue, as Jimin and Taehyung fling him through an instant of shattered nothing, of silence that sears him down to the bones and the fundamental particles of his soul -- warping, and not under his own control.

But he manages to land next to Namjoon, and not in an undignified sprawling heap, and then the next thing he knows is the familiar screening sight of a pattern of honeycomb.

A pattern that seems to amplify the hum rising out of Yoongi -- which, how does he have the wind for it, how does he still have the breath? He’d been too late to get to Yoongi when he’d been bowled over by one of Titan’s attacks, he’d only watched in frozen dread as Yoongi had been thrown through the air -- he’d heard the thud of Yoongi’s landing, nothing graceful about it, nothing even upright about it.

He’d run towards that heap of unmoving muscle and then Jungkook and Hoseok had arrived, both of them shouting at the tops of their voices, and then Seokjin had heard Namjoon call out in that command-voice of his, loud enough to be heard from one end of the island to the other.

Yes he had been -- no he’d broken from the plan --

Namjoon had gone rogue: and it’s so typical of him, Seokjin thinks. It’s just how Namjoon is. If Lucis had not been the loose confederation that it had ended up being, pointless and full of empty promises to their home islands of Galahd -- hells, if Galahd had never fallen or never been assimilated -- his words alone would have swept him to a position in the gathering of the family groups, never mind the voice with which he would speak, never mind the way he would know how to convince the island-factions to go his way.

There’s an element of insane luck in all of this, Seokjin thinks -- or at least he can still try to think, as Leviathan shrieks and tries to lunge for them. Entire endless depths of darkness and the teeth of her, the teeth of the fury of the ocean, and -- the only thing that gets in her way is the quelling look she receives from on high.

The face of an old man, leaning proud and immense upon a lightning-bent staff.

Insane luck. Right. Only Namjoon would dare. And only Namjoon would remember to also direct his angry words to Ramuh -- him, Namjoon, a mortal with immortal courage, maybe, or is it just immortal foolishness? But Galahd is Galahd, and whatever it is that Namjoon is running on, it’s the one single thing that unites six out of their seven.

The very heart and soul of Galahd is this, that they forged a covenant with the Astral of storms and of the laws of Eos. That they had agreed to become Ramuh’s people, from the very first generations right until their very undoing, until their very scattering.

And what kind of covenant had they created? What kind had endured? -- The kind of covenant that let them talk _back_ to their patron, for good or for ill.

And Namjoon has extended that one-sided covenant, has called the wrath of mortals down upon the ones who made them, and Seokjin’s knees might knock together but he can’t fall, can he? He can’t budge, can he? Not unless he wants to undermine Namjoon’s arguments, the air already blistering with his fiery logic.

Hiss of warning from beyond him, thready with fear, as Bahamut draws a sword from -- his back? His wings? -- and maybe the words suddenly spilling out of Jungkook are a prayer or maybe they’re just nonsense, and Seokjin tries to keep breathing at all.

“If you created us, if you created mortals, then -- good for you,” he hears Namjoon growl. “Everything else after that is an act of control. You appear to us in these forms so that we fear you. You ask us to worship you or else misfortune might find us. If you are the creators, if you are the controllers of this star and of its destiny, if you’re our deities, then why haven’t you helped? Why have you been only in the fucking way? Why is _this_ all we get out of you?”

The movement of his arm that takes in this ruined place, barren, nothing but the howl of the wind now, and the slap of the waves upon boulder-shores.

Namjoon finishes that sweep, and mutters something else. A blasphemy.

“Useless. That is all you are.”

And then Namjoon looks away, and covers his face with his hands.

Seokjin doesn’t think: he turns his back on the Astrals, too, without any hesitations, without any other thoughts in his head other than comforting his friend.

The others close in on them and Seokjin feels the rocking of all of them, the weary sway. Seven paces of clipped breath.

Which one of them looks back, first, when the light changes? Which one of them first feels the change in the world coming?

All he knows is the pain that explodes in his ears, and then -- movement, something, some kind of horrific power bearing down upon them -- no way to move, no way to dodge -- it pierces straight through Yoongi’s shields, and the last thing that Seokjin can do is push them all down to the ground, is try to remain standing -- as if he could be their lightning-rod, as if he could take the entirety of an Astral’s attack for them --

The world vanishes in a searing pulse of light --

*

_five years later_

A room that -- isn’t really in shambles any more, but the last time he’d been in here he can remember the feeling of walking into a stranger kind of atmosphere. A place that was wider than the walls and the ceiling might have suggested, lit up in color-bleed refractions, lit up in the stories told in stained and faceted glass flooded with sunlight.

Again this room and again this sunlight, but there’s something worn-down about this place now, and maybe it isn’t just about the fact that there is no longer any dais, and no longer any kind of looming monstrosity of a throne, or of all the shapes carved around in and over it. Hunched and leering stone, and the faces of the Astrals in silent and eternal judgment.

Instead, there’s a perfectly ordinary wooden bench at the far end of the hall, just clear of empty dusty temporary masonry, and there’s a man in a slightly-too-stiff black suit sitting on the bench.

Two items take up the rest of the length of the bench: it takes him a moment to identify them, and then Seokjin has to blink, and sort of stare, as the man in the suit looks up from the phone in his hand and -- smiles. Just a small one. Just enough to be inviting, even as the late-morning sunlight lands in his hair, in the silver strands of him.

In matte black and the polished metal of the slight curve in its handle is a simple cane, but it’s placed next to a magnificent sword in its scabbard: and even Seokjin knows what that one-sided arrangement of [w](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy/images/a/a9/Sword_of_the_Father_from_FFXV.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20181107165206)ings along the hilt means.

A sword meant to be wielded by kings and queens, passed down from one royal hand to another, and now in the hands of the last of that line.

“Your Majesty,” and Jungkook’s voice is startlingly hushed, though the sounds of him still ring in the vastness of this hall, still echo.

Like he has a larger presence, larger than his shoulders and his chest and the discreet purple chain he wears, looped around and around the left sleeve of his regulation Kingsglaive [c](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy/images/1/11/Retinue_in_Kingsglaive_attire_from_FFXVRE.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20180911190645)oat.

It’s the only thing that he wears that isn’t textbook-neat, textbook-correct.

Seokjin can’t stop the smile that rises to his mouth, when Jungkook catches up to him, and then tows him forward the rest of the way.

“Hello, Seokjin Kim,” and Noctis Lucis Caelum CXIV nods, and holds up his other hand, bandage-wrapped, to them. “Hello, Captain Jeon. It’s good to see you both again.”

Seokjin bows, but only in the way that he’s been asked to. Nothing more than a polite dip of his head. The words are still strange in his mouth, but he knows that he’s been called here to say them. “King of Lucis, I bring you greetings from -- my comrades. They’re a little bit scattered at the moment, or preoccupied, but they asked us to give you their well-wishes for your recovery.”

“Nothing a few weeks of rest won’t cure. Tell Yoongi we’ll be sending him the materials he asked for. Oh, and how is Namjoon holding up?”

“He’ll survive,” and Seokjin has to laugh, too, behind his hand. There’s a wealth of fondness disguised as weariness in Jungkook’s words.

“He had better. If I lose him now, Galahd-Anew will have my head, and I’m not keen on that. You understand.” Lines in the King’s face, crinkling around the soft scruff of his facial hair, crinkling with his honest and open smile. “But I will not keep either of you from your -- other appointments. I only wanted to see you, so that I can reassure you. I won’t make promises that I couldn’t keep myself. Please rely on our continuing support.”

“And I am not officially here to speak for Galahd-Anew,” Seokjin says, “but we’ll continue as we have started. What we do now, what we build now, we do so in hopes of -- ”

“Of it outliving us. Namjoon, and you and your group.” Noctis is no longer smiling. “And my group and I. Yes, well, you know how it goes,” and the next gesture he makes includes his cane, and also their faces.

Seokjin looks away, and he almost gestures at himself, at his face. “Apologies. Most people find us hard to look at.”

“How many times do I have to say it? I don’t mind that at all,” he hears Noctis say. “That would be like saying I mind _you_. I don’t.”

“Maybe you don’t, but most people look for it and act like they aren’t,” he hears Jungkook say, and Seokjin thinks the only reason he doesn’t roll his eyes is because of who he’s talking to. “Can’t always say that’s a bad thing though.”

“Yeah.”

“Your Majesty. -- Ah, forgive me my hastiness. Please, carry on; I’m not here.”

“Nonsense,” he hears Noctis say, around a grunt, as he propels himself to his feet. He still sways, only a little, before reaching for his cane and for his sword. “Is everyone else early, Ignis? -- That’d be a first.”

“They seem to be the wrong kind of curious today,” and Seokjin returns the bow that Ignis Scientia tilts in his direction, sure and knowing despite the dark-tinted wraparound sunglasses that cover up his scars.

Maybe Scientia wears his sunglasses out of politeness, out of the thought of not startling others with the reminder of what he has seen and done and accomplished, right there on his face and demurely obscured.

Seokjin thinks he can’t relate.

Jungkook looks at him, familiar and not only for the star-shape that he wears red and raised on his forehead, and grins.

And that is the thing that people look for, when they look at them.

No one else that Seokjin knows, among the Glaives, among the veterans of the Long Night, has these markings. Just him, and the ones who had been there on the island with him, Namjoon and the others who had screamed at the Astrals. Each one of them is marked now with that star, seven-pointed, indelible on their skin, and maybe people stare at them these days as much as for that star as for the fact that they had survived at all.

Noctis’s laugh is not amused at all, even as he seems to shift his things around, and for what? Apparently to hold his advisor’s free hand.

“Sounds like they’re asking for trouble. Let’s give them that today.”

“When don’t we?”

“Excuse us, please,” is Noctis’s parting shot, and for a moment Seokjin thinks he either suits the sword he’s carrying, or the sword suits him. He can’t quite tell which is which.

Jungkook is looking thoughtfully after him, afterwards.

Seokjin smiles, shakes his head a little, and -- “Later. All that later. At least let me tell Namjoon I did what he asked me to do, before -- we go and make trouble.”

“Okay. Later. But only because you asked.”

“It’s a good thing, though,” Seokjin says, softly. “ _When don’t we?_ I’ll agree with him, just this once.”

He never expected to walk away from Angelgard -- they never did -- and the weight of Jungkook’s hand around his wrist is a welcome one, is the weight he’d rather have on him now, as they leave the hall.

-end-

**Author's Note:**

> Did you find all the links and Easter eggs? :) // [twitter](https://twitter.com/ninemoons42) // [cc](https://curiouscat.me/ninemoons42)


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